India, of Asia—cruel, beckoning, mysterious, scented, fascinating, portentous, inexplicable—
The rune of Asia—and how could he resist the call of it?
Something tugged at his soul.
If he had wings to fly from the window, to launch himself across the purple haze of the town, to alight on some flat roof, then to rise again and swing out and beyond on the sweep of the northbound wind across the great Indian peninsula; over the central jungles that stretched like a great sea of vegetation, an entangled, exuberant blending of leaves and spiky creepers and waxen, musky flowers, a rolling wave of green life; over the perfumed valley of Kashmere, the foot-hills that rolled down like enormous, over lapping planes; clear across the carved, sardonic immensities of the Himalayas where the harried sun hid and shivered amongst the northern snows … and out into the heart of Asia … if he had wings to fly!
“What shall I do? How can I go?”
Again he asked himself the question, and, suddenly, he thought of Ali Yusuf Khan's parting words:
“Trust the blade. It will speak to you when man fails you—or Fate.”
He felt slightly self-conscious, slightly ludicrous. For he was an “Englishman, a European, an average Occidental swinging, intellectually and emotionally, half way between Christianity and biology, and what was all this painted, twisted, mazed Oriental tommyrot
